In her years of notoriety, porn star Linda Lovelace had a fevered, glazed neediness — a quality
that makes it easy to avoid ever seeing (or wanting to see)
Deep Throat.

In her later years, as an anti-porn spokeswoman, the neediness was transformed into the
professional aura of someone who had come to terms with her life. From working-class origins,
Lovelace seemed like someone who had to learn the hard way how to navigate the big world.

Amanda Seyfried — who portrays her in
Lovelace, a compelling new film from Rob Epstein and Jeff Friedman — seems like someone
from a comfortable background who has been loved all her life. So, when called upon to play an
unloved person, she can only imagine how awful she might feel.

But, if Seyfried’s Lovelace isn’t quite the real Lovelace, she is nonetheless a sympathetic and
fascinating locus for the film, which tells a miserable, dispiriting story but does it so well that
the experience is galvanizing, not depressing. Perhaps what makes it galvanizing is that this woman
— as abused and publicly humiliated as any public figure of the past 50 years — is finally getting
her say, albeit from beyond the grave. She died as a result of a car wreck in 2002.

The whole story, in just five words: Linda met the wrong guy. As a teen in Florida, she makes
the acquaintance of Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who runs a topless bar, where the girls turn
tricks. Traynor charms her and provides an escape from her loving but remote father and her harsh,
cold mother (played to perfection by Sharon Stone).

Linda marries Traynor — and, if she never made another mistake for the rest of her life, that
would have been enough to push her straight into a ditch.

As played by Sarsgaard, Traynor is a sporadically engaging, psychologically tortured sadist.

The screenplay adopts an unusual strategy. First it tells Linda’s story, and it’s bad enough.
Then it goes back and tells the same story, this time filling in the blanks, and it’s indescribably
worse.

Even then, the movie skirts over her decision to get into porn, probably because it’s hard to
imagine Seyfried’s Linda being so lost (or so terrorized) that she would agree to it.

Lovelace is based on her autobiography,
Ordeal.

The filmmakers are entirely in her corner, perhaps more than she deserved.

If even a quarter of her story is true, she had a lot more coming than a sympathetic hearing and
much prettier actress playing her on screen. She practically deserved an apology from the male sex,
and that, in a way, is what this movie is.